Valentine’s Cards: Paper Quilling for Kids

January 2, 2014

A wonderful Paper Quilling for Kids Project – learn how to make these adorable Paper Quilled Hearts – using big paper quills for smaller hands. If your the kids are feeling more confident, why not take a look at these wonderful Paper Quilled Daisies or Paper Quilled Wreaths?!

Hi, all! I’m Jeanette Nyberg from Artchoo where I offer all sorts of art projects for kids and design for kids. I live in the Chicago area with my family and I love coming up with easy ideas for kids to be creative every day.

We are big fans of paper projects here and I’ve been wanting to try a basic quilling project for some time. This is extremely basic – if your kids enjoy this they may want to explore some more complicated quilling techniques. I found some amazing videos on You Tube.

In any event, this project will introduce to your kids (or reinforce) the idea of using paper as a 3-dimensional medium instead of it always being flat. Poor paper just wanted to evolve…

UPDATE: We Made a Craft Video of Paper Quilling for Kids

Materials:

Colored Card Stock

Scissors

Glue

Something to coil the paper around (we used a small paintbrush handle. A pencil was too thick and made the insides of the paper spirals too open.)

Directions:

Cut small strips of colored card stock. We used white, light pink, and red. The strips were approximately 14 x 1 cm. Older kids can use a craft knife to cut strips, but we found scissors worked quite well- the strips don’t need to be perfectly even.

Coil the strips, one by one, tightly around the paintbrush handle. They will stay coiled when you remove them.

Fold a full piece of colored card stock in half (this is the card itself). Using 2 strips of card stock, form a heart shape and glue the strips onto the front of the card. We applied glue to the edge of the strip and held it in place for about a minute per strip. I then placed a light box over the heart to keep it in place while it dried for about 1/2 hour.

Now is the fun part! Dip each coil into a puddle of glue and place inside the heart. We used 3 colors, but feel free to experiment with more or fewer colors.

That’s it! Don’t forget to inscribe the card with a sweet message to your valentine…

Be sure to visit Artchoo for more creative ideas for kids, including these projects: